What “lean and mean” really means

Becoming lean means cutting salaries, trimming overhead, making the work place more spare, more crowded, and less comfortable. In short, it means making people´s jobs less enjoyable in every conceivable way. If you find yourself working at a plastic desk in unnatural light, without proper clerical support, surrounded by bothersome noise, something is wrong, Your office at home, the place where you settle down for a few hours a month to pay your bills, is not as grim. Why would an organization provide for its people so much less than those people provide for themselves. There is a very good reason: the organization is failing. Becoming lean is not a sign of future health, but of present failure. The ultimate way to achieve leanness is downsizing, or, to put it more bluntly, firing lots of people more or less at random. Downsizing is exactly the opposite of what management has been chartered to achieve. The natural goal for almost any business is upsizing. Downsizing programs are clear admissions of upper management failure